Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for December 14th, 2007

After a snowy week in Ottawa, here are some random thoughts in the area of Personal Finance:

• New housing prices are up 6.1% year over year for October. This rate is slowing, but is still pretty darn crazy in some areas.
  • Saskatoon is up 47.9% year over year for new housing prices
  • Edmonton is up 24% year over year
  • Amazing
• More statements about young Adults staying at home to build up a “nest egg” to buy a house. Stats Canada reinforces that statement, sure hope my kids aren’t reading this, remember moving out is a good thing! Get rid of those darn Kippers!
• The net financial debt of Provincial and Territorial governments is down again, which is a great thing to read, but then again, how about the municipal debts in those areas?
• In Ottawa evidently 0% is actually 4.9%, where our Mayor ran on a ticket of 0% property tax increases and now the City council has passed a budget with a 4.9% property tax increase. Luckily OC Transpo is also increasing their bus pass costs by 7.5% every year for the next 3 years. They keep this up and it will be cheaper to send my kids to private school than it will to buy them a Bus Pass! (what font should I be using for rants). If you want to read the draft budget it is 837 pages long, which explains why our taxes are so high, if it takes that long to describe everything, this is BIG government.
• The Christmas season is upon us, remember to look for good deals, and that the size of the present doesn’t matter (but then again, I am a man as well, and we believe size never matters, except in cars).